Showing results by author "Ardath Mayhar" in All Categories

As a young child, Morgan Rein was taught by Mother Kalavela the curative powers of White Witchcraft. Ancient arts and skills employed in the service of mankind. The greatest of these elemental talents is the ability to control fire. Now, from out of her tortured past comes a deadly threat in the form of a psychotic warlock bent on murder and destruction. A cruel, sadistic soul who also happens to be her brother. 

American twins Bud and Lindy move to England when their father's transferred there. When their English grandmother becomes ill, the twins stay with their Aunt Edythe and Uncle Clifford. Uncle Clifford writes and illustrates a series of children's books about the little people called the Turnipins. Much to the children's surprise, they find in the woods a small door attached to a tree fronting a hill. Inside they discover that the Turnipins are real!-even if they can only appear in their real guise to children.

Chosen in his youth to be the "One Who Smells the Wind" for his Anasazi clan, Uhtatse becomes a part of every element on the mesa where his people have built their pueblos. As he meets with traders from distant lands, he learns of their unusual ways of living and begins sending his mind outward, searching for the enemies from the plains that he knows are waiting to kill them.

When the bombs fell and Western civilization ended, the residents of Hickory Hollow, Texas, scarcely noticed the difference. They were already used to fending for themselves - growing their own food, helping their neighbors survive, keeping their rural life going, much as before. But when the Ungers-a band of renegade thieves, murderers, and ne'er-do-wells-began raiding the nearby plots, looting and killing everyone in sight, it was time to take action!

Best-selling author Margaret Thackrey, an ex-Government courier, lives in Oregon with her husband. Now her agent wants her to pen an account of her years in the service, and she agrees, in part to ease her memories of the experience. But Ambrose Decker, whom she'd almost caught assassinating the man he'd been ordered to protect, must eliminate her to avoid being revealed. After causing her husband's death, he chases her from Oregon to her original home on an East Texas farm. There she must finally confront her past - and a determined, vicious killer!

Olive is the most unlikely of secret agents, a professional assassin in her sixties who's known only as "The Knit Lady." She begins her trade by killing the Italian mobster who'd cheated her late husband, and then is quietly recruited by "The Brokers." Now she's hired to kidnap and kill retired British agent Benjamin Scarlatt. But The Knit Lady has scruples, and when an Islamic terrorist group takes control of the cruise ship on which both she and Scarlatt are traveling, she decides to fight back, with knitting needle, scalpel - and plastic explosives.

Araminta Palomer, the oversheltered child of a wealthy family, enlivens her life by imagining a near-invisible animal playmate: Willbe. But "Minta" possesses an unsuspected psychic talent, and so she unwittingly creates a tulpa, an envisioned being that gradually becomes tangible, first to herself and then to others. Willbe seems a loving companion at first, but as Minta matures, he changes into an increasingly perilous and unreliable friend.

They came from outer space, these hideous, intelligent monsters, and they wanted our colonies, our goods, even our flesh. They looked like a cross between a spider and a crab, except bigger-much bigger-and meaner-much meaner-and they never stopped coming! World after world has been devastated, and man has been forced into a continuous defensive retreat.

When Annie is forced to resettle from Los Angeles to an East Texan farm, she saves her money to buy the Absolutely Perfect Horse. But the nag she actually gets is a 35-year-old Appaloosa nicknamed "Dogmeat". In the end, though, this worn-out old steed proves his valor when a pack of wild dogs attacks the farm.

"Ardath Mayhar is a neglected writer, and that is criminal. She is one of those born storytellers and natural writers who has done so much so well that it is easy to take her for granted. Trust me, as the spider said to the fly: read Ardath's work. Be captivated by her worlds. They will never let you go. Promise." - from the Introduction by Joe R. Lansdale

The upper-class inhabitants of the locked-gate community called Holroyd Square in Templeton, Texas, are used to their sedate, private lives - and the equally private secrets that each of them keeps hidden from the others. But when a vicious blackmailer rudely interrupts their existence, and then is found murdered in the Square, the police must be called, and only Assistant Chief Wash Shipp can uncover the killer and save their tattered reputations.